


Tower

by Linden



Series: Seven Devils [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: A Little Bit of Horror, M/M, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-04-27 03:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5032285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Palm readings are problematic for boy-kings of hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I so thought that there was going to be angsty feverish smut in this story, I really really did, and then, well, nope. Next time!

**Devils Lake, North Dakota**  
**21 December 1999**

The lightning storm that lit up the evening sky over Devils Lake was like nothing Sam had ever seen. 

He sat outside in the cold to watch it, curled into the rickety swing on their tiny front porch with one of Dean’s flannel-and-canvas field jackets and their old down blanket wrapped around him, a mug of cocoa laced with whiskey cradled in his hands.  The weather had been dodgy for a week, ever since Dean and Dad had left him in their rundown, ramshackle cabin here to go hunt an active coven one county to the west, but this storm, it was—Sam could feel the wrongness of it in his bones, and every _crack_ of white across the sky tightened the cold knot of panic in his chest.

 _Let them be okay_ , he prayed, blindly, to the night, to the wind, to the wild; to Pastor Jim’s god, in His far-distant heaven; to his mother’s ghost. _Please let them be okay._

Neither Dean nor his father picked up when he called (not the first time, not the second, not the thirdfourthfifth), and he curled into bed that night still afraid, still tucked up in Dean’s jacket with Jim’s medallion of St. Michael clutched in one hand.  _Be okay.  Please be okay_.  He woke an hour later, shaking, from a dream of Dean’s body laid out in the cold chamber of a morgue, their father on the slab beside him.

The landline rang just before midnight. Sam tumbled out of bed and caught it on the second ring.

‘Dean?’ he said, high, tight, panicked.

Dean sounded beaten up and bone-tired, but he was alive and snarky and quoting _The_ _Wizard of Oz_. ‘Ding-dong, Sammy-Sam,’ he said, and Sam slid down the wall to sit on the floor, shaky with relief, and too grateful that his family was safe to remember to mention the storm.

***

**22 December 1999**

Alone in the late afternoon quiet, hair still damp from the shower he’d taken after his after-school run, Sam listened to the 4:30 weather report with half an ear as he got dressed, pulling on worn jeans and an old tee and his brother’s soft, broken-in grey Henley that Dean thought he’d lost two months ago.  Sam just—he liked to wear it, when Dean was gone, liked the comfort that it brought him.

  _—has just formed incredibly quickly, folks, and has already put three inches of snow on the ground this past hour; Dickinson is already seeing the first flakes coming down along the I-94 corridor, along with some lightning along the bow curve of this storm, and it shows no signs of slowing down. It’ll be in our neck of the woods a little after mid—_  

The TV crackled for a moment, all snow and loud static, before the picture snapped back into place.   — _on canned goods, now’s the time! Some seriously wild weather we’ve been having this week, so stay tuned for more updates throughout the evening. Back to you, Evie._

There was the sound of a car pulling up the dirt drive outside and, a moment later, a cheerful double honk. Sam tucked a knife into his left boot and shrugged into the warm parka Dean had found for him at a Salvation Army store a month ago, and then zipped it up to his throat and grabbed his keys and stepped out into the twilight and the rising wind, leaving the light and the TV on behind him. It would be comforting, later, not to come back to silence and the dark, if Dean and their dad weren't yet home.

The porch was bright with the headlights from Ximena’s Jeep, idling on the other side of the fallen pine that blocked the top of their drive, and the sun was dying in the west.  James was waving a Santa hat at him out the passenger side window, reindeer antlers already blinking on his own dark blond head.  A ribbon of warmth unfurled in Sam’s stomach at the other boy’s careless, teasing smile.  He was tall and lean with green eyes and broad shoulders, and Sam wasn’t stupid, okay; he knew why he liked him.  But James was also funny and kind and better at math than anyone Sam knew, and on Sam’s first day in their English class he’d solemnly passed him a note written entirely in Tolkien’s runes, and Sam just—it was never going to go anywhere, and he knew it; they’d be leaving inside a month, if that long. But he could still taste the kiss James had pressed against his mouth that afternoon in the parking lot, warm and soft and unapologetically _wanting_ , and it was . . . it was just really nice, sometimes, to feel wanted, even if only for a little while.

'Get the lead out, Winchester!' Ximena's voice, merry and bright. 'The winter carnival awaits!'

The sky was grey overhead, tinged with just a little color from the fading sunset, and Sam jogged lightly down the steps toward his friends beneath it, his skin humming with the coming storm.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The translation of the Latin in this chapter appears along with a geeky language note at the end.

Devils Lake's winter carnival (as Sam was given to understand, from Ximena) had rolled in late last night, rattling into the sports arena lot maybe half an hour before the lightning storm that had lit up the town. It was just the bones of a typical small-town fair, a Fun Slide and bumper cars and a rickety-looking Ferris wheel, all in the midst of a sort of shanty-town of food trucks and carnival games; Sam had watched the rides going up that morning from the window of his history class. But by the time he and Xi and James arrived that evening, craft booths had popped up, too, courtesy of local artists, and an ice sculpture contest all along 16th St., and a snowshoe softball game was in its fourth inning in the lit-up field down the block. There were three lanes for frozen turkey bowling on 5th Ave, and jugglers tossing flaming pins at the corner, and sleigh rides being offered around the nearby track, and Sam felt the near-perpetual knot of worry and wariness in his chest easing, just a little. Crowded and bright, noisy with kids shrieking and the rattle of the wheel and the Christmas music piped in through the big outdoor speakers, the place was kind of perfect, really: a little pocket of time where he could pretend that he was nothing more than a kid out with his friends at the holidays, celebrating the beginning of Christmas break.

As night crept in and the last of the dusk-light vanished, he failed spectacularly at bowling a turkey, massacred a plastic pool full of rubber ducks at the shooting booth to claim a giant teddy for Xi, bought a wooden skull-and-bones bracelet for Dean, inhaled a funnel cake and a deep-fried Twinkie for supper, and now and again knocked back a slug of the vodka James had disguised in a 7-Up bottle, because he was sixteen and James was pretty and Dean was alive and coming home, and vodka seemed a good way to toast all of those things, really. And so he was happy and full and pleasantly buzzed by the time they came across the ratty purple tent on the other side of the Ferris wheel, with felt stars sewn to its walls and a sign staked out front that declared it the home of MIRELLA THE SEER, who for the price of one ticket would tell you (sell you) your future.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, no,’ Sam and James said, together, as Ximena squealed like a little girl and grabbed them both by the hands to tow them towards it. ‘It’s—’

 ‘It’ll be fun,’ Xi said, firmly. ‘She’ll read our palms or contact the great beyond or something, and—’

‘Ximena, come on—’

‘Shut up,’ she announced, with authority. ‘You’re coming. And she’s going to tell us that you and Sam are gonna get married and adopt ten adorable little babies and that I’m gonna be their auntie, and once she does we’ll need more funnel cake and another go at the bumper cars. And you are, like, crazy cute when you blush,’ she informed Sam, who could feel himself flushing to the tips of his ears, both from Xi's words and from the slow, sweet smile James was giving him as he did. She let go of their hands briefly to give a cheerful smack to the bell hanging outside the tent, and when an old, quiet voice called, ‘Come in,’ she pulled them both in after her.

Inside was about about as cheesy as Sam expected—there was incense and a lot of hanging scarves and a brazier of coals giving off dim light, and the woman sitting on the other side of the table looked like a child’s image of a gypsy: long grey hair loose down her back, silver at her hands and throat and ears, a brightly-colored shawl around her shoulders. But all the same, when she smiled at the three of them as they piled in from the cold, there was a . . . a frisson of something that Sam could feel hot along his spine, the same sort of thing that he felt around Bobby when he was spell-casting, or that he felt sometimes around Jim at the consecration at Mass, and amid the crystal ball and dagger and book and bell and candle spread out on the table, there was a set of tarot cards that looked well-worn and old—all of them tools, not toys. Something must have shown in his face, surprise or bewilderment or both, because her smile deepened a little as she looked at him, a teasing glint in her tired eyes, and as Ximena dropped three tickets in the bowl, and Mirella welcomed them formally in, encouraging them to pile their jackets and hats and gloves beside them, Sam found himself smiling back.

To Ximena she promised travel, and success in whatever career she turned her hand to, and the possibility of three children; to James she promised a long life and two great loves and cautioned against relying overly much on luck. Sam slid into the rickety chair last, curious and nervous at once, and held his hands out across the table. The woman’s were warm as she took them, her thumbs smoothing across his palms. She tsked softly over the callouses she found there, and the scar that marred the heel of his left hand, and then she bent closer to study his hands, as she had Xi’s and James’, and Sam waited for her to speak.

She said nothing.

After a moment he glanced over at James and Ximena, who were watching from near the entrance; James shrugged and rolled his eyes and propped his shoulder against a tent pole, and Sam looked back across the table at Mirella. Her fingers had tightened on his hands.

‘Ma’am?’ he finally said.

She folded his fingers gently over his palms and held them there for a moment. ‘Child,’ was all she replied, quietly, and there was grief and worry and something very like fear in her voice. She looked at him then for a moment in utter silence, before she reached for her deck of tarot, fanned the cards out in front of him on the cheap velvet cloth. ‘Choose,’ she said. Bewildered, Sam did so; she flipped the card face-side up on the velvet cloth: the Tower, burning, upright. Sam felt something tighten a little in his stomach. Their father had never put much stock in readings, but Sam knew the major arcana well enough, all the same, and he knew what this card meant: destruction, revolution, revelation. ‘Again,’ she said, quietly, and Sam felt a bite of something sparking and cold this time as he touched the cards, like a static shock, ice-edged. She pointed to a spot just above the first; he set his second card down on the cloth, and she flipped it to find another Tower. He glanced up at her, startled, wary; none of the cards in a Tarot deck were doubled, so why—

Her hands were shaking. ‘Again,’ she repeated, tightly, and he did so, four more times, fingers stinging with cold as he lay each card he chose face-down in the pattern she pointed to on the table as he pulled them. She flipped the first three over in swift succession when he was done; Tower, Tower, Tower, all three of them Towers. The Devil was the last, though it was like no Devil card Sam had ever seen: none of the usual iconography, only a man all in white, bloody-mouthed, with a black dog at his feet and a green-eyed man beside him.

He looked up to find the old woman staring at him, face bloodless, lips white. She said something he couldn’t catch, in what sounded like Italian, and when he put a hand out to her, thinking only that she might be ill, she recoiled as though it were a snake.

‘Ma’am, are you—’

She was on her feet, shaking, still staring at him with a look so like horror on her face that Sam felt something twisting in his chest. She made a complicated sign against evil with her left hand as she kept the table between them, pointed toward the tent flaps with her right. She said something again in Italian, voice shaking; said it again, louder, insistent, but he didn’t—

James’ voice, uneasy: ‘Hey, lady, Jesus, take it ea—’

Sam never saw where the darkness came from. One moment the tent was full of the warm dim light from the coals in the brazier; the next there was a ribbon of solid black swirling around the old woman where she stood, and her rings were glowing red, were glowing white, were melting on her hands in smoking streams of liquid silver, and as she started to scream, long and loud, the darkness poured itself down her throat in a column of smoke shot through with embers, and then her jaw snapped shut with an audible click and she collapsed into her chair like a puppet with its strings cut, head tipped forward, arms loose at her sides, long hair hiding her face.

Sam was aware, dimly, of James’ quick, panicked breath behind him, and of sudden voices outside the tent. The woman’s head snapped up again, far too fast to be human.

Its eyes had gone beetle-black.

Sam felt ice flood his stomach half a heartbeat before Ximena started screaming, and then the woman-thing’s ruined hands darted out to pin his wrists to the table—too strong for a human, too cold for a human, its touch hammering long spikes of ice into Sam’s bones where it held him fast. It leaned toward him, close enough that he could smell something like sulfur on its breath, and Latin came rolling off its tongue like water in the dark. ‘Domine,’ it breathed, in a man’s voice now, not a woman’s: rich, dark, reverent, old, the dead language sitting in its mouth as easily as a native tongue; and it bent its head to press a worshipful kiss to the back of each of Sam's hands. ‘Ave, mī domine.’

He could hear, from outside, people shouting ( _Mirella! Can you hear me? Mirella!_ ), could hear James’ voice at the tent flaps, panicked, high ( _—won’t open; I can’t get it open!_ ), but the sounds seemed muffled, somehow, as though coming at him from a long way off. The thing had lifted his head again and was looking at him, avid, hungry, was smoothing its thumbs along Sam’s wrists like a lover, and he couldn't—he wanted to move, he wanted to speak, but there was ice in his stomach and a buzzing in his ears, and for half a heartbeat he thought he—he thought he saw—

‘Tibi sacrificium preparāvīmus,' the thing said. There was a sudden wind, hot, sulfurous, that scattered the cards from the table and fanned the smoldering coals in the brazier to life; sparks flew, caught on one of the hanging scarves, lit, and suddenly there was fire crawling in a long ribbon of light for the ceiling, and Jesus, the whole tent was going to go up—

The thing was still speaking, singing almost, and Sam was torn between terror ( _fire Jesus fire_) and a sort of black, bewildering recognition, something inside of him waking, rising: preening and knowing and pleased.

‘—ex adulescens, domine umbrārum, rex adulescens, domine tenebrae, rex adulescens, domine noctis, domine crepusculī, domine abyssī, domine infernī, domine baratrī—'

Its voice was rising to a shriek, high-pitched, piercing, above the rush of the wind and the crackle of the spreading flames, and Sam couldn’t tear his eyes off the thing in front of him, off the sort of ecstasy in its borrowed face—

‘— domine gehannalis, tu quī eras lucifer, tu quī es lucifer, tu quī in aeternum eris lucifer—’

He could hear James and Ximena, both of them screaming.

‘—tē vocānte, veniēmus; tuō iussū, surgēmus!’

The thing let go of his left wrist to snatch up the dagger on the table, and before Sam could so much as blink it had slashed open Mirella’s throat. Blood sprayed across Sam’s face and into his mouth in two strong, hot pulses fresh from the vein, sizzling like hot streams of copper on his tongue, and as the thing collapsed face-forward on the table, twitching, a stream of black smoke pouring out of the gaping wound, Sam heard a hundred voices roaring _Ave_.

***

There were cops, after, and firemen, and worried bystanders and weeping carnival workers, and an EMT who took a look at the burn on Sam's cheekbone and cleaned the blood from his face and wrapped him in a thick orange blanket against the cold. He kept the sleeves of his hoodie pulled down over his wrists, not knowing how to explain frostbite at a fire scene.

‘She just . . . she just wigged out,’ James was saying, hoarse and hollow, to the sharp-eyed detective who'd come to speak with them.  ‘She seemed nice, when we first came in, you know? Read Xi’s palm and mine, no problem, but then  . . . she kind of freaked out over Sam’s, and wanted him to choose cards after, and then she wanted us to get out and then she went _crazy,_ and the light made her eyes look all weird, and she grabbed Sam and started spouting gibberish _—'_

 _Ave, mī domine,_  the thing had said, as though it had been waiting for him, as though it had _known_ him.  

'—and then she just—she cut her own _throat_ open, and I don’t—’

_Tibi sacrificium preparāvimus._

James' voice rose and fell, rose and fell.  Sam should have been paying attention to it, he knew; he had absolutely no doubt that his father was going to expect a full field report later, and _sorry, Dad, I was having flashbacks like a goddamned civilian_ wasn't gonna be helpful when he did. But echoes of the thing's Latin kept rolling through his memory (and there had been so much else,  _so much else_ , but he wasn't Bobby, wasn't Jim, had caught only that the thing was calling upon a lord of hell and Lucifer), and every time he looked around, every time he tried to get a bead on things, there were beetle-black eyes and razor-edged smiles flickering through the crowd—in a fireman, in a carnival worker, in the _detective_ , for Chrissakes—and in the shadows all around were the shapes that looked like monstrous hounds.  He wasn't certain whether it were the vodka or the shock, but he couldn't trust his eyes. He couldn't trust his goddamned _eyes_ , and he didn't know what that—he couldn't—

Lightning cracked overhead, seaming the sky in white.   _Some lightning along the bow curve of this storm_ , he remembered the weatherman saying, a few hours and half a lifetime ago, but it raised the hair on the back of his neck, all the same. There was a strange sort of pressure in his chest—something dark, something blooming.

He was shaking, just a little, and he couldn't get himself to stop.

The taste of Mirella's blood was heavy on his tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I kind of got carried away with the Latin here, and I'm not sure whether Latin's a lingua franca of Hell or whether Sam just happened upon a demon who remembers Rome under the Caesars, but either way, it seemed creepier than English.
> 
>  _Ave, mī domine:_ Hail, my lord.
> 
>  _Tibi sacrificium preparāvimus:_ We have prepared for you a sacrifice.
> 
> _Rex adulescens, domine umbrārum, rex adulescens, domine tenebrae, rex adulescens, domine noctis, domine crepusculī, domine abyssī, domine infernī, domine baratrī, domine gehannalis, tu quī eras lucifer, tu quī es lucifer, tu quī in aeternum eris lucifer, tē vocānte, veniēmus; tuō iussū, surgēmus!_
> 
> Boy-king*, lord of shadows, boy-king, lord of the dark, boy-king, lord of night, lord of twilight, lord of the abyss, lord of hell, lord of the pit, lord of the infernum, you who were the light-bringer, you who are the light-bringer, you who will be the light-bringer forever—when you call, we shall come; at your command, we shall rise.
> 
> [*Technically "young king," as Latin doesn't allow for the creation of shiny hyphenated things. But I like the phrase "boy-king" too much to give it up in English, so.']


	3. Chapter 3

Later, after James' dad had driven him home, and after he'd told his father everything he could, and after he'd scrubbed himself clean in the shower until the water ran cold and he was raw-skinned and stinging, Sam lay asleep in their cabin's one big bed, his brother wrapped around him like a shield, John dozing on the couch with salt and iron beside him, and dreamed.

He was older, taller, stronger, screams and laughter alike echoing all around him, and the shadow he threw out before him, long and thin, kept shifting from jackal to nightmare to man. He was striding toward something, toward some _one_ , toward Dean; Dean who was sprawled lazily across the steps at the foot of an iron throne, barefoot and shirtless, beautiful and sharp-edged and dangerous as a blade; and as Sam approached, he looked up, sleepy-eyed, _white_ -eyed, licking blood from his lips like cream, and smiled. 'Domine,' he said, and Sam startled awake, shaking, in the roaring, windy dark.


End file.
